Disaster Recovery Best Practices: 3 Strategies for a Plan

It is important for businesses to implement a disaster recovery (DR) strategy for your critical data. Losing critical data can have a severe and negative impact on the operation of day-to-day business. The primary question that business owners should ask themselves is - “What would happen to my business if I lost all of my data?”

Here are three key best practices for businesses to consider when implementing a disaster recovery strategy:

First, document a DR plan.

Your business should have a plan in place for the worst case scenario, test it and practice it. If you are building a DR plan during a data loss event, it is already too late.

Second, use multiple providers in different regions.

Keep a secondary copy of your data at another provider if you are using cloud storage. Unimaginable and catastrophic events can and do occur. One example that comes to mind when I was working for a hosting provider. A competitor’s data center had a large electrical fire and customers were unable to access their data during the event. If your day-to-day business operations depend on the availability of your data, take the time to have a second copy at another location.

Third, validate your backups and restores.

Validate that your backups are completing successfully and that you are backing up the data that you need. You also want to validate that you are able to restore the data that you have backed up. This should be done at least quarterly and on a recurring basis. I’ve seen customers try to back up files that are locked by a process and unfortunately, if they are not using a product that offers “live” backups the file may never be backed up. By failing to validate or restore your data, you remain unaware that your critical data is not backed up.

How can Jungle Disk help?

Jungle Disk currently offers two providers, Rackspace Cloud Files and Amazon S3. You can create 2 backup jobs that backup the same data to 2 separate providers in different regions of the country.

Our experienced support team is here to guide you on how to properly setup a backup, help you validate your backups and teach you how to restore your data. Reach out to us by phone, email or live chat, we want to help!

If you have implemented number 1 and 2 you are well on your way to having a DR plan in place for your business critical data.

In closing, implementing a DR strategy for your business is essential to ensuring that data loss will not negatively impact your business or customers. With inexpensive cloud storage prices and simple backup solutions, not having a DR strategy for your data is a risk that you don’t need or want to take. Happy DR planning!